Demonstrates Intel® XMM 7160 multimode 4G LTE solution, now in final interoperability testing (IOT) with Tier 1 service providers across North America, Europe and Asia.

COMPUTEX, Taipei, Taiwan, June 5, 2013 – At an industry event in Taipei today, Hermann Eul, general manager of Intel’s Mobile and Communications Group, unveiled new details about the company’s forthcoming Intel® Atom™ processor-based SoC for tablets (“Bay Trail-T”) due in market for holiday this year.

Based on the new Silvermont microarchitecture, the next generation 22nm Intel technology for tablets and ultra-mobile devices will enable sleek designs with 8 or more hours of battery life2 and weeks of standby, as well as support Android* and Windows 8.1*.

Eul also spoke to recent momentum and announcements around the smartphone business and demonstrated the Intel® XMM 7160 multimode 4G LTE solution, now in final interoperability testing (IOT) with Tier 1 service providers across North America, Europe and Asia.

“The mobile category is undergoing a tremendous amount of innovation and constant change,” said Eul. “As we look at growing it, we continue to invest in and accelerate our efforts across all aspects of mobility with a focus on smartphones, tablets and wireless communications. Intel’s unique assets will enable more compelling and differentiated products and experiences, while at the same time helping to shape and lead markets in the future.”

Next-Generation 22nm Intel® Atom™ Processor-based SoC for Tablets and 2-in-1s
Building on the progress of the Intel® Atom™ processor Z2760, the new products will deliver efficient, quad core processing that doubles the performance over the previous generation, according to Eul.

The next-generation Intel Atom processor-based SoC for tablets (“Bay Trail”) provides the best balance of performance, features and battery life, he added. Taking full advantage of the broad spectrum of capabilities enabled by Intel’s design, microarchitecture, 22nm tri-gate transistor technology, and leading-edge manufacturing, Intel can quickly scale up and down in performance and power efficiency to address various market and product needs. With the new 22nm Silvermont architecture, Intel delivers industry-leading performance with fewer cores, allowing Intel platforms to bring to life incremental features and capabilities.

Eul discussed Intel’s focus on enabling a richer media and content experience by improving graphics performance. He then highlighted the tablet platform’s new Gen 7 graphics that will offer more than three times the graphics capabilities1, with support for DX11 for expanded PC application and game support.

The new Intel Atom processor-based platform comes equipped with hardware-based security with McAfee Live Safe. This digital life protection suite keeps online identity private, protects from phishing attacks and keeps data secure while protecting the devices.

Intel’s next-generation Atom processor for tablets will provide the benefits of both performance and productivity. Any task performed on a tablet or 2-in-1 device, from light photo editing to office productivity, becomes much faster and more interactive. People will see increased capability and richer content and will be able to play popular 3-D games on these sleek, battery-efficient devices than previously possible.

Bay Trail also represents the first time Intel is offering its customers a mobile platform solution that is flexible with regard to operating system and the company will provide the same great Intel tablet performance and high-resolution graphics at cost savings to consumers.

Enabling Mobile Devices with Intel Inside®
Intel platform and enabling programs have been the foundation of OEM and ODM innovation for decades. Eul said the company is currently focused on work with leading ODMs and OEMs to speed time-to-market of leading-edge mobile devices based on Intel technology.

Intel’s platform and ecosystem enabling efforts will be focused initially on Intel Atom processor-based tablets running Android* and Windows*. The company is providing pre-qualified solutions with simplified building blocks to scale designs quickly for mature and emerging markets.

It would also mark a shift for Samsung, which has previously used ARM chips in the 10.1-inch Tab line (it does use Intel processors in its Ativ Windows products). While Reutersdoesn’t delve into just what’s behind the change, it would no doubt be a welcome development for Intel, which has struggled in mobile with its x86 silicon thus far.

(Reuters) – Microsoft Corp is developing a new lineup of Surface tablets, including a 7-inch version expected to go into mass production later this year, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the company’s plans.

Microsoft executives felt they needed to keep pace with the growing popularity of smaller tablets like Google Inc’s 7-inch Nexus and the 7.9-inch iPad Mini introduced by Apple Inc last October, one person told the paper. ()

Microsoft declined to comment to the Wall Street Journal. The company could not immediately be reached for comment by Reuters outside of regular U.S. business hours.

For the past several days I’ve been playing around with Futuremark’s new 3DMark for Android, as well asKishonti’s GL and DXBenchmark 2.7. All of these tests are scheduled to be available on Android, iOS, Windows RT and Windows 8 – giving us the beginning of a very wonderful thing: a set of benchmarks that allow us to roughly compare mobile hardware across (virtually) all OSes. The computing world is headed for convergence in a major way, and with benchmarks like these we’ll be able to better track everyone’s progress as the high performance folks go low power, and the low power folks aim for higher performance.

The previous two articles I did on the topic were really focused on comparing smartphones to smartphones, and tablets to tablets. What we’ve been lacking however has been perspective. On the CPU side we’ve known how fast Atom was for quite a while. Back in 2008 I concluded that a 1.6GHz single core Atom processor delivered performance similar to that of a 1.2GHz Pentium M, or a mainstream Centrino notebook from 2003. Higher clock speeds and a second core would likely push that performance forward by another year or two at most. Given that most of the ARM based CPU competitors tend to be a bit slower than Atom, you could estimate that any of the current crop of smartphones delivers CPU performance somewhere in the range of a notebook from 2003 – 2005. Not bad. But what about graphics performance?

To find out, I went through my parts closet in search of GPUs from a similar time period. I needed hardware that supported PCIe (to make testbed construction easier), and I needed GPUs that supported DirectX 9, which had me starting at 2004. I don’t always keep everything I’ve ever tested, but I try to keep parts of potential value to future comparisons. Rest assured that back in 2004 – 2007, I didn’t think I’d be using these GPUs to put smartphone performance in perspective.